Tip of the tongue

Queen's University, Belfast's "parody of esteem" principle is producing more, er, steam than light since Queen's appeased the Nationalist half of its intake by dropping the Queen from graduation ceremonies.

Now the Ulster-Scots Language Society is asking the student union for equal treatment with English and Irish. It is not immediately apparent how comfortably words such as wee, youse and farl - as in soda farl - will fit in on student union signs and literature. But the two-year-old society says that up to 100,000 people in the province are capable of speaking Ulster-Scots, which they argue is more than a dialect and has been classified by Euro bosses as an official "lesser used" tongue.